Morning Must Reads: February 3

In the news: Bill O'Reilly interviews Obama, Janet Yellen takes over the Fed, U.S. and E.U. to offer financial aid to Ukraine, and will NJ Gov. Christie's scandal hurt donations to the Republican Governors Association?

“President Obama, in an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, tried to put behind him the scandals that have hung over his second term, suggesting his administration did not mislead the public on the Benghazi attack and going so far as to say the IRS targeting scandal had “not even a smidgen of corruption.” [Fox News]

In writing
last week about Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers' (R-WA) State of the Union
response, I noted her mention that she was the first person in her
family to go to college. At Religion News Service, religious studies
professor Matthew Rindge takes a look at that college,
and provides some vital insights into how "Christian" education has
helped shape some of the stars of the Republican Party's religious
leaders.

Rindge writes from Gonzaga University, a Jesuit institution in
Spokane, Washington, part of the Congressional district Rodgers
represents. He says that Pensacola Christian College, from which Rodgers
graduated in 1990, provides an "extreme" treatment of the Bible, and a
"peculiar" attachment to the King James Version. "Their obsession with
the KJV," Rindge notes, "is at odds with scholars who consider dozens of
alternative English versions (the New Revised Standard Version, for
example) to be more faithful translations since they, unlike the KJV,
are based on more ancient (and reliable) biblical manuscripts."

According to Paul Ryan, Pope Francis’s views are right in line with
the GOP’s; he’s in favor of the free market and he’s steadfastly opposed
to the “welfare state.”

During an interview on ABC this Sunday, Ryan, who is infamously
Catholic, was asked by host George Stephanopolous if he’d been “a little
too flip” in his past criticisms of the Pope.

“No, not at all,” Ryan insisted. “They have crony capitalism in
Argentina, where you have exploitation. That is not the free market,
that’s crony capitalism. We’re starting to see some crony capitalism
here in America.”

And
if you look at his comments very closely, he always talks about the
welfare mentality,” Ryan added. “He always talks about the welfare
mentality and how we have to avoid creating a welfare state. Bring the
poor in and create upward mobility and free enterprise that gives
opportunity to everybody, no matter who they are and where they are in
life in America. That’s what we’re for.”

“Of course not, he’s a pope!” Ryan replied. “Popes don’t endorse
budgets. Popes say let’s have a conversation about how to fix the broken
status quo, how to bring the poor in, how to not have a welfare state,
and how to produce upward mobility. Popes don’t endorse actual
legislative changes or budgets like that.”

About a year ago, Ryan made headlines when he criticized the Pope’s
attacks against unbridled capitalism, saying that the Pontiff doesn’t
really understand how capitalism works since “they haven’t had real
capitalism in Argentina.

"The bill’s chief sponsor, Republican Sen. Phillip Gandy, said the measure is intended to address the perception by some Christians that their right to practice religion is being inhibited by the government, although he admitted he hadn’t heard of any examples of the state doing so."

So. You pass a law to protect you from a situation that doesn't exist. And they wonder why we laugh at them.

@mantisdragon91 Could the GOP allow us to even see what "real capitalism" looks like. We spend $36 million on SNAP and $860 million on corporate welfare every year and we can't afford SNAP? If we can't afford $36M, we sure as hell can't afford $860 M. Is Ryan willing to bite the hands that feeds the GOP???

@mantisdragon91 I would really, really like Ryan to produce the pope's statements against a welfare state and in favor of free enterprise. I'm not sure which "pope" he thinks said that stuff, but it wasn't Francis. Or Benedict. Or JPII. Or …

Religion is the only subject in which some people are proud of
believing the same thing at age 40 that they believed when they were 6.
It is the only field in which development in critical thinking is seen
by some as regression. With religion, people think their opinion is as
legitimate as a trained professional. And the consequences are not
merely academic: People unwilling to engage in a critical study of
religion or the Bible are destined to worship a God and Jesus of their
own making.

This peculiar brand of nonthinking religion might help explain how a
person of "faith" might vote against giving women equal pay to men
(Lilly Ledbetter Act), or vote against including gays, lesbians, Native
Americans, and immigrants as people that should be protected against
domestic violence (Violence Against Women Act), or vote to cut food to
hungry children and the elderly.

“I should just say at the outset that I think as a rule, I do think
sometimes we do over-punish people for crimes they’ve committed in the
past,” Cooke opined. “We take away their vote, we take away their guns,
and we can sometimes ruin their lives for too long.”

“But this is an issue where privacy is of paramount importance,” he
continued. “There’s a lot of personal information and financial
information that is being pushed through the system. And some of the
people who are working in the system really have some developed skills
of fraud and corruption.”

@mantisdragon91@Sue_N And this is the best person Republicans could come up with in their rebuttal? Her story doesn't pan out and then we find out about her education.

Don't they vet these people? Do they just grab someone off the street willing to tell an Obama story and not care at all that it doesn't pan out? I know they think their base is stupid and that they can sell them anything, but at some point it becomes embarrassing to show just how stupid they think the base is. Can't they figure out that maybe an independent who actually reads and thinks can figure it out?

@Paul,nnto@Sue_N@mantisdragon91 "If you look at his comments (which I have so helpfully translated from the original not-English … could be Latin … or Spanish … who knows with these guys?) very closely … after you've run them through this sooper-secret Republican decoder ring … and if you stand on your head and hold your mouth just right and play this Beatles song backward … then you will see that I am just completely making this sh|t up because no way in hell has this pope (or any pope, really, except maybe the Borgia guy) said anything that remotely supports any of my Randian nonsense."

He's said lots of stuff, like when people point out FUX racism, he claims he's just not interested, except when it's racism on certain threads here, then, it's Obamabots pretending to be GOP racists just to discredit them.